Welcome

Welcome, all!

This page is the next step in the evolution of how I engage the world online. This is not my first attempt at writing online. Most significantly, I journaled my experience in Teach For America. But for the first time, I plan to be intentional about addressing an audience beyond just myself and the people I know personally.

I’ve been writing for a long time now. I got my start on Internet message boards. It was a safe way to express my opinions and debate people, while not really being exposed. Even though I never tried to hide my identity on a message board, I generally interacted with people who I’d likely never encounter in real life. Writing was always my weakest subject in school, but many years of practice have improved my skill considerably. And I also learned how to craft and critique arguments.

With Facebook, I began to take a bit more risk. My friends and family know me to be fairly opinionated and outspoken. That probably seems like a fairly normal thing to most people, but it is very different from my personality growing up. I spent those years fairly obsessed with not standing out. So, taking stands on issues in front of people who actually known me was a big change. Today, I do this routinely.

At some point, I realized that all of the reading, thinking, and writing I do have made me pretty good at this. And I started to believe that what I say might actually have the potential to change the way other people see things. I’ve even been told so by a small handful of people, which is quite humbling.

Moreover, I began to see communicating as a responsibility. For Facebook posts where I’d really put some thought in, I started setting the privacy to “Public” to allow friends to share more widely. You can see these posts on my Facebook profile. On a recent such post, one of my friends challenged me to begin blogging.

And so, here it is. For sure, I plan to use this to publish my thoughts on things I feel have societal importance. The contentious stuff. If you know me at all, you know I’m absolutely horrified that in little more than a week, Donald Trump will be President of the United States of America. You can count on politics being a major theme of this website.

But I might also use it to put out my thoughts on more lighthearted fare, like tech and travel. We’ll see! Anyway, thanks, in advance, for reading.